Home for the Holidays

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I’m going home for the holidays.

Home being a relative term, of course. While it’s in the same town, my mother’s house is the third she has lived in since I left home 38 years ago. I’ve never lived in it for more than a few days at a time.

But it’s the people who make it home, right? In the past seven years, however, the people have gone, one by one. First my grandmother, then my brother Nick, then my father. That leaves my sister Sharon, my brother Jack, and my mother. But my sister and brother and I have grown apart to the extent that I often visit Mother and never speak to them, even though my sister lives in the same town and my brother in the same house. There’s no animosity, just indifference.

So that leaves Mother. Mother is 80 years old. She’s in pretty good health, but she is increasingly frail in both body and mind, and I know the end is coming, not soon, but eventually.

And when she dies, I will no longer have a family home to return to.

My husband is already an orphan, having lost both his mother and father more than ten years ago. We talk about how strange it is to be on our own, to be approaching the time when our home is the home our son and, hopefully, his family will visit at Thanksgiving or Christmas.

But for this year, I can still go home for the holidays.

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Because I won’t have access to an Internet connection for the next five days, I won’t be able to blog. I’ll be back on line next Monday evening. I hope your holidays are merry and festive.
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